Monday, 15 December 2014

Shore Marks

A difficult week coming to terms with the fact that one month of my notice has gone already, increasingly anxious about finishing off everything I need to in the remaining few weeks. The annual Kew Carol Service was a joy, especially singing O Radiant Dawn, but underscored with sadness, especially thinking about Nigel Veitch, our choir conductor to whom the service was dedicated . I won't be part of it next year and it's proving increasingly hard to have to tell people that I'm leaving Kew and cope with their reactions and questions.
So I spent some time over the weekend absorbed in the solace of stitching, piecing together one of my quilts for 'International Threads' exhibition in Prague in April 2015.
This quilt is for the theme on 'Creating visual texture with repetition'. I started out with a kola shibori dyed piece of damask cloth bought from African Fabric Shop and a piece of the same fabric that I'd put in the indigo vat. The repetition is from the lines, the underlying patterns on the damask and from the accidental marks of indigo left on the original cloth which I will emphasise with indigo stitch marks. I feel the need for some hand stitching at the moment to keep me anchored.

2 comments:

An occupation, a job, is often so much more than that. It becomes part of who you are, your achievements and aspirations. Colleagues become like family. And so to know that you are leaving them is like dealing with a terminal illness, and after the break there needs to be time and space to grieve.I know that when I left publishing to accompany my husband to the USA, it was on the one hand the beginning of an adventure - but it was also a terrible loss. Although I had lots of challenging and rewarding jobs after that, again in publishing - that initial tearing away from who I thought I was proved more of a wrench than I had imagined.Stitching is a great coping and mending facilitator. Good luck.

Hand stitching will do that - calm and ground you. Change is difficult enough to deal with. Change not of your choosing even more so. Good to work with something you have at least some control over, something that will whisk you away into contemplation.